The Big Meow

It is a night like any other, except that this is Hollywood Boulevard, and on the Boulevard there is no such thing here as a night like any other, as they are all different while pretending to be the same.

There is a bar on Hollywood Boulevard in the Hotel of the same name, and there the citizens and denizens of the area congregate at all hours that the L.A.P.D. allows them; which in the case of the Boulevard Bar means six AM to five AM, that hour being when they mop the floor and chuck out the denizens who are unconscious or no longer able to pay their tab — this latter category being something that must be judged nightly by Tough Therese who minds the cash register, and that on a case by case basis. It is at about four-thirty AM, therefore, that someone sitting at the bar begins to hear the many and entertaining variations on the theme of helping someone else pay their tab for them. But there is also something else that sometimes happens then, and it involves the backwash from four AM, which is when sick people are known to die and crazy people are likely to become the craziest, always depending of course on what the Moon is doing.

Rhiow shook her head until her ears rattled, trying to keep her “eyes” in Urruah’s head as she did so. “What is this?” she said. “Fiction or news?”

“It’s hard to tell with them sometimes,” Urruah said, “especially when they get into magic realism. I think maybe this is an early practitioner – “

Rhiow wanted to start banging her head into some friendly yielding surface, or whack Urruah upside the head, or both. For her “magic” and “realism” were parts of the same continuum: but Urruah seemed to be describing some kind of strange ehhif literary fad rather than the simple truth. Nonetheless – it being a simpler and possibly kinder response than just getting down out of the bookcase, walking across the back of the ehhif’s chair and hitting Urruah very hard between the ears — for the moment Rhiow just kept reading:

Now it is held as a matter of fact among the residents and clients of the bar in the Hollywood Hotel that there is a place in the middle of the great North American continent where crazy people roll across to and then mostly get stuck. It is the Continental Divide, and east of it reside the people who are pretty much sane, and in Denver reside all the people who are only sort of half crazy and having hit the Divide can go no further. But the truly nutso folk roll right over the Donner Pass and down into Nevada and Oregon and Washington and so on, but most especially into California, where there is just something that attracts them, maybe the San Andreas Fault, and the crazier they are the further they go, and the very craziest wind up in Los Angeles: and the most select of those crazies are in Hollywood.

Rhiow looked over at Urruah again, more bemused than before. He simply shook his own head, and his own not-inconsiderable ears flapped as if in a gale. “Read it,” he said.

She bent her head to the page again, glancing over when it was finished to the next one —

Now even among the Hollywood set some of the crazy people stand out, and these are mostly the ones who arrive from Pennsylvania, or Transylvania, or some other vania, with an eye to relieving the locals of their hard earned dosh. There is much of this commodity available in Hollywood, for it is a locality rich in film industry types who have acquired great heaps of the necessary along the way, and who love to be seen to fling their moolauw about the landscape in various and sundry directions, thus theoretically proving that they are worth more than the cost of the clothes they stand up in, which can be considerable. Fancy jewelry much with gold and diamonds the size of California walnuts are nothing to these swells, as are mansions the size of the Grand Central Terminal, which is very grand indeed, and therefore many of the crazies, especially those who are crazy in the manner of the fox, have hit on the conceit that all the simooleans possessed by these industry swells are no good to them, for (say the crazy-as-a-fox types) they have no inner beauty, which is to say the beauty of the soul. And these foxy types get busy selling inner beauty and meditation and strange old religions and stranger new religions to these movie people, and relieving them during the process of vast wads of cash, which is of course supposedly worthless anyway, so that this is obviously what the LAPD would normally call a victimless crime.